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Monday, April 22, 2019

TBR: A Constellation of Half-Lives by Seema Reza

TBR [to be read] is a semi-regular, invitation-only
interview series with authors of newly released/forthcoming, interesting books
who will tell us about their new work as well as offer tips on writing, stories
about the publishing biz, and from time to time, a recipe!

We don’t expect an elevator pitch from a poet, but can you tell us about
your work in 2-3 sentences?

This project began as a series
of second-person poems addressing an imagined (though not quite fictional)
woman named Khadija, a mother living directly in the path of the Global War on
Terror. There are letters to other American civilians, to my sons, to veterans,
to my sisters and mother, to people I have hurt and to people who have hurt me.
It’s about looking closely and searching what I’ve called “other” for my own
reflection.

Which poem/s did you most enjoy writing? Why? And, which poem/s gave
you the most trouble, and why?

The poem I most enjoyed writing (which
incidentally might also be the one that gave me the most trouble) was “Reckoning
with Impermanence,” a not-quite-crown of sonnets. In 2016 I took a road trip up
the coast of California with my then sixteen-year-old son, and was confronted
with how tremendous experiences of beauty are also terribly sad. You want to
enjoy them, but the whole time you know they are going to end and that gets in
the way. But if you didn’t know they were going to end, you wouldn’t appreciate
them. I’d been turning this over in my head, but when I took a Split This Rock poetry
master class facilitated by poet Danez Smith, I found the space to grapple with
this big question, to just ask and ask and ask it. It was terribly difficult to
write, but it also helped me understand some things, to make a little more
accepting of impermanence.

Tell us a bit about the highs and lows of your book’s road to
publication.

The collection was one of the
winners of the Write Bloody Publishing 2017 manuscript competition, which went
in stages—submit 5 poems, wait. Make it to the second round and submit 20
poems. I toiled on that twenty, turned off as much of my life as possible to
just write and rewrite, then submitted the set and waited again. The Friday
they were supposed to announce the winners I didn’t receive an email so I
assumed I’d lost. I went to bed and woke several times with my heart literally
hurting—I’d wanted it so badly, I’d worked so hard, I’d felt like the work was
so strong. The next morning I dusted myself off and wrote a long reflective
piece in my journal about how I got some good poems out of the process and that
was the purpose of the entire exercise. I genuinely made peace with it. Then I
got an email saying something to the effect of, “We’re sure you know by now
that your manuscript was selected…” They’d announced through a video posted to
social media, which I hadn’t watched because it was too sad that I hadn’t received
an email. What an idiot! So that was the low and the high. Because by the time
I realized the book was selected, I had genuinely come to terms with the idea
that all that writing and revising I’d done had been for the sake of my own
craft, so publication became this gift untethered from the effort.

How did you find the title of this book?The title of the book is from a poem called “Quartering” and in that poem, the image is a reference to depleted uranium particles in a soldier’s body, the full line is “try not to see the glowing particles of depleted uranium/turning his body into a constellation of half-lives.” As the title it comes to refer to the constellation of lives the poems in the collection attempt to inhabit.

What’s your favorite piece of writing advice?

I once heard Brendan
Constantine, who is one of the most scholarly, gifted poetry teachers I’ve ever
witnessed, say “A poem is best viewed through the lens of its last line.” My
drafts are always a few lines past that point, and I return to that bit of
advice in editing and cut back to the image I want the reader to look back at
the piece through. It’s been such helpful, practical advice, and I pass it
along every chance I get.

My favorite writing advice is “write until something surprises you.”
What surprised you in the writing of this book?

To seek surprise is good advice—I’ve
found that if I’m traversing familiar ground in my writing, I’m probably not taking
any risks or writing anything interesting. In this collection, which I thought
was about the role of the civilian in war, and about my experience of motherhood.
But I also discovered how much I needed to write about being a daughter, and
about the taboo and dangerous experience of female solitude.

Inquiring foodies and hungry book clubs want to know: Any food/s associated
with your book? (Any recipes I might share?)